For our first anniversary, I wanted to give Ryan something that followed the tradition.  I kept thinking paper. .  . Paper, oh no, how can I give him paper?? A love note, a card, what should I do??

Then I had a great idea.

We have been married for a year and I have yet to put our wedding photos in an album, I thought, I will make an album.   Then I realized that was going to be nearly impossible to do without him seeing it, and with the 500 wedding pictures we have the album would take a lot of time to work on to keep it from being a little redundant. How could I leave any pictures out??

So, I decided I needed to think again. . .

then, I truly had a great idea.

Ryan and I have been working on setting up a site on Smugmug for us to use to post photography prints for sale.  Aside from prints Smugmug will also create many different kinds of photography merchandise; such as T-shirts, puzzles, mugs, etc.  Smugmug works with a company called Blurb, blurb.com, to create photography books.  I decided to look into blurb.com a little more, and quickly realized I had found the perfect gift for Ryan.

I had found something that I could work on after Ryan left for work in the mornings, or before he got home in the evenings without creating a huge mess.

I created a 40 page photo book of our Wedding and Reception.

I love it! And, I’m pretty sure he loves it too!

You can see a preview of the book here.

The software Blurb uses, “BookSmart”, is remarkably easy to use, and the publishing process only takes about a week! This is a great way to give a long lasting, priceless gift!